Interview

by Dan GoldwasserPublished: October 2, 2002

Composer Jeff Danna
started to get more recognition with his score to the controversial drama O,
and now with his score to the successful The Kid Stays in the Picture.
Previously, Danna also worked with his brother Mychael on two Celtic albums, as
well as scoring music for film and television projects. SoundtrackNet got a
chance to catch up with Jeff in Los
Angeles where he was mixing the
score to his latest project.

You recently scored The
Kid Stays in the Picture, the highly acclaimed biopic about Robert Evans.
How did you get involved in the project?

Directors Brett Morgen and
Nanette Burstin were looking for a composer, and were just listening to CDs.
They took a somewhat uncommon approach. They got about 40 CDs in from different
agencies, then they took all the covers and resumes and put them aside, and
just listened through the albums - and at one point something caught their
ear. When they went and looked back, it turns out it was my score to O.
They got in touch with me and said they wanted to talk about this project - and
once I saw the film, I was sold. It's a very good movie. So this is just one
of those things where they connected with something I had written.

Does that approach happen
often with you?

It happens more often now -
people have heard more of my stuff now I suppose.

I've been getting calls now
because people have heard my music from Kid. At the time, I was just
pleased that someone was listening to the music, and not deciding strictly from
the resume. I was pleased that something musical had touched them.

How did you approach the
score, given the large timeline that the film covers, and the different musical
influences through the varying time periods?

I think the most important
thing that Brett and Nanette said to me was, "This film is an opera, and
Bob's voiceover is the libretto". I had to think of it that way - they
really wanted to play this stuff up. The pathos would be deep, the trouble
would be traumatic, the good times would be sparkly and tinged with gold. It was
really that kind of operatic approach to things that was really attractive from
a musical point of view - it sounded like a lot of fun. Then it was just a
matter of figuring out era-by-era, and event-by-event in his life, how best to
handle it. So it was quite a challenge! There were some topics covered in the
film that you never would really cover in a more straightforward dramatic
feature.

Can you give me an
example?

Well I remember the first
thing we came up against was trying to decide what to do in the moments where
things in Bob's upward career-momentum started to get out of hand. Like when
Frank Sinatra calls Bob up and says, "Give me back Mia Farrow," (she
was shooting Rosemary's Baby for Bob), "I need her for my
film!" Or the moments where Paramount says "We're going to fire you" and he has
to make the pitch for his life in the New
York meeting - the life of the studio,
really. And we were wondering how to score those moments. We thought that
carnival music would work, because his life was very carnival-esque, spiraling
upwards. And so we ended up with that brassy, twisted carnival music that is
present in a lot of the score. Another thing that is rather unorthodox [ as a
subject to score ] was the episode in the film when he sells the rights to the
book "The Detective", and he bargains for a suite of offices, or
something like that. It's not your typical scene, but it's a deal that was so
pivotal in his life. So we decided to do an ironic and slightly off-kilter
waltz to describe his interaction with the rest of the industry. So many
things were a little unusual to approach, musically.

How did you work you score
with the songs?

All of the source music was
set, so I knew what was there. I had to write into them, and out of them (so to
speak), bearing in mind the key, tempo and atmosphere. So things like the Cat
Stevens song, or the Elton John song, were basically landmarks that I had to
work around.

What is the story behind
the "Godfather Love Theme" performed by Slash?

That was a last-minute
addition to the album. I was at Bob's house, and we were just finalizing the
order for the CD, and he off the cuff mentioned that he had this thing he
wanted to play for me that Slash had given him for his birthday, about five
years before. It's not in the film, but it's a nice capper to the album. It's
somehow very "Evans-like", and it seems to fit somehow into the whole
thing. It was literally a last-minute addition - he handed me the DAT that
night, and we mastered it the next morning.

According to your
biography, you were more of a performer, until you suffered a hand injury?

Yeah, I had a really bad case
of tendonitis and carpal tunnel in both my hands and forearms. It was bad - I
had a hard time opening doors and stuff. It was pretty debilitating, and the
doctors questioned my ability to continue on as a player at that point of
time. That precipitated this shift from performing to composing -much like my
brother's injury, which is really weird. The straight-up-performer in me was pretty
much over. It took a long time before I could play a lot again, like 8 or 9
years. In the meanwhile, I could only do it in bursts, to write, and to do some
session work.

Your first major
television show was "Kung Fu: The Legend Continues".

That was my first television
show that I did here in the States. I had done a number of Canadian features
before that, and another TV show based in Canada. But that was my first show for Warner Brothers,
based in the USA. I then did 10-12 episodes of "Beverly Hills,
90210". Basically, I started in films in Canada, then came to the
States, and started back at the bottom doing television and worked my way back
up to films. Uncorked was my first feature here in the states, and O
was my first studio film.

On the CD release of the
score to O, the final track, "To Take Flight", seems to be
underscoring the finale of the movie - but in the finished film, the "Ave
Maria" is used instead. What prompted this decision?

"To Take Flight"
was a track that I did separately from the film. What I did was take a few
different themes that were in the film, and wrote another track to give the
album its own end-point. But it wasn't part of the film, and wasn't written
for a particular scene. I try to make my soundtrack albums a listening
experience just on their own. I work hard to re-sequence them, and edit them
to make them as melodic and thematic as possible. And listening to O, I
realized I needed a nice ending, especially after all of the gloom and doom.

How was it to be competing
against rap and hip hop songs for the movie soundtrack for that film? Did it
influence the type of score you were writing?

Well we wanted to play away
from that kind of music. The only mandate director Tim Blake Nelson gave me
when he hired me was that he didn't want anything electronic in the score, and
wanted it to be an organic, orchestral score. So we went from there, and were
playing something completely different from the songs on purpose.

Who decided to use the
piece "The Blood of Cu Chulainn", composed by both you and your
brother Mychael, for the opening credits of The Boondock Saints?

I was actually hired on that
film on because the producer and director were fans of the Celtic albums, and
they thought it would be really great to include it somewhere. As they went
through the process of putting music on the film, they had a Rolling Stones
song, "Street Fighting Man", for the opening credits - which was
going to cost a ridiculous amount of money. I can't remember if I suggested it
first, or they suggested it, but they had liked "The Blood of Cu
Chulainn" previously, and decided to use it there. The Celtic album was
how they got to know me, so it made sense that it would come back to that, I
guess.

What is your level of
collaboration with your brother, Mychael? You've written some scores with him,
and even performed for him on some of his scores.

We've done some writing
together. Green Dragon is the last film we wrote together, we did those
two Celtic albums together, and we did some films in Canada as
well. I'm sure we'll do something together again in the next year and a half.
He's been really familiar with my guitar playing all his life, so he'll
generally call me up when he needs some guitar stuff. He called me in for Girl,
Interrupted, and I did some work on Antwone Fisher. We have a good
time workingtogether.

Green Dragon was a rather unconventional score, with heavy
Vietnamese influences. What kind of research did you do for that score?

We did more research than
we've ever done before, or even since - about a month of research.
Fortunately, there's a very large Vietnamese community in Orange County - the
largest outside of Vietnam itself, so I'm told. So there is a great selection
of instruments available, good musicians and singers. The director, Tim Bui,
hooked me up with a liaison in the music community here who was a translator
and musician as well. He was indispensable, and introduced me to a lot of the
people down there.

Learning about the
instruments and their harmonic approach was a very different experience.
Vietnamese music in its rawest form is quite an alien sound to Western ears,
and if we had taken that approach, it wouldn't have flown with the director,
for sure. It also wouldn't have worked with the film which was about Vietnamese
people thrust into America - a clash of cultures - so it had to represent both
sides. So obviously there's a lot of bending the sounds and textures their
music has into a Western sound, but trying to leave elements of their sound
intact.

How do you and Mychael
collaborate? What is your process?

It's the same way as on our
albums. Each of us would take a theme, and get it started and we'd build on it
to the point where we'd start to toss things back and forth and put it on the table
and look at it together. But someone has to come up with the raw materials for
each piece by themselves - you can't just sit in the room together and say,
"How about a C, then a G!"

What is the most exotic
instrument you've ever composed for?

I would say that dan bau on Green
Dragon. It's a single stringed instrument that the player changes the
pitch by bending a single piece of wood, to which the string is attached,
thereby changing the length (and pitch) of the string. . It's very mournful,
and has a very unusual sound. I think it's the most exotic one that I've
worked with, in terms of being a completely different sound than anything in
the Western world.

Have you found that you
have had to play an instrument that you've never played before, because you
couldn't find a player?

That happened here the other
day. This score I'm working on right now has Russian music in it, and there's
an instrument called a gusli, which is like an autoharp with a keyboard on the
left-hand side of it, and we read about it, and found one, but couldn't find
anyone to play it! So I found an instrument that was like a psaltery -
basically a box with steel strings that you could play on your lap. It was
basically a gusli, without the keyboard chord-markers, so we just recorded that
since we couldn't find anyone who could play it. As I recall on The Kid
Stays in the Picture I played a ukulele for the first time just because we
needed one for the vaudeville piece.

Would you go back to
scoring episodic television on a regular basis?

It would have to be something
awfully good. The thing about television is that once you establish the sound
and color for the show, there can be a lot of repetition. So I'm more
interested in doing things 2-3 months at a time, and then going on to the next
project.

What would you describe
your music as belonging to, stylistically?

I think there's a pretty wide
range in my work. I just finished Kart Racer, a kid's go-cart movie,
and it was like a Nine Inch Nails score. And I go all the way up to the big
orchestra sound from there. I would say that the one common thing is that I
like folk instruments a lot, and love to use them with the orchestra. It can
mean a lot of extra work, but I like stuff that's a little bit rough and a
little out of tune - that handcrafted quality. I think I enjoy hearing
different colors than just the orchestra all the time. I like to spice it up
with some unusual textures, and I prefer acoustic textures to electronic
generally, so instruments like the hurdy-gurdy etc. are a great way to get to
those types of things.

So what is this current
project you mentioned, the Russian one?

It's a Showtime movie called The
Yeltsin Project. It's a very good story about these three American
campaign advisors who get a call from Yeltsin's administration saying that
they're getting killed in the polls, and need help. So they go over there -
it's supposed to be "hush hush" - and they come up against an
extremely creaky bureaucratic system. It gets more and more dangerous for
them, because as they convince Yeltsin to follow their strategy and he
eventually starts to catch up in the polls, many people in the Communist Party
and organized crime are unhappy about this - and at the end there are snipers
on rooftops looking for them. It's a political thriller directed by Roger
Spottiswoode (Tomorrow Never Dies). I enjoy working with Roger, we have
similar passions. We worked on The Matthew Shepard Story together,
which is where we met.

What was the musical
direction given to you and your brother for that film?

Oh yeah - I worked with
Mychael on that one, too! I remember that Roger said he didn't want it to
sound like a "television movie" - he didn't want the emotions to be
worn on their sleeves. That is, to make it emotionally restrained - a colder
temperature, so to speak. Not to say "this terrible thing has
happened", but rather to play it in a different way.

What is your dream
project?

Oh, I really like alternate
reality, or historical things - so there would be really unusual
instrumentations available. I like fairy tales, so a fairy tale on steroids
would be great - a two parter, so there would be lots of music!

The Grey Zone, a Holocaust film directed by Tim Blake Nelson and
scored by Jeff will be in theaters in October. Kart Racer reaches theaters
in March. The Yeltsin Project will air next summer. Jeff's scores to The
Kid Stays in the Picture, O, Green Dragon, Uncorked
and Baby are available on CD.

Special thanks to Josh
Jarry, Ray Costa, and the folks at Costa Communications for making this
interview possible.